Jennifer Saunders has just been reminded of a wager, big and scary. She is working on a script for Absolutely Fabulous, the movie, and Dawn French - the other half of French and Saunders - has publicly bet her £100,000 ($170,000) she won't write it.

Surely, it's just a joke?

"You don't know Dawn French," she says.

'I absolutely wanted to curl up and die ... there was just us, looking like a couple of lampshades.' Photo: Trevor Leighton

Of course, Jennifer Saunders does, better than most, the pair first meeting in their student days in the 1970s at London's Central School of Speech and Drama. From there emerged a nascent comedy duo, the Menopause Sisters, performing at parties dressed as punks and singing songs about a hamster that was trodden on. This would be the beginning of French and Saunders.

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Saunders is walking down the hallway of her home to find the best phone reception to talk about her autobiography, Bonkers: My Life in Laughs, ahead of an Australian tour. She is reflecting on being a reluctant author of prose. "My friend Dawn French had done one and it seemed like a massive amount of hard work," she says.

I find the first part of her comment revealing: "My friend Dawn French …" It's early in our conversation and her first mention of French.

Jennifer as Edina and Joanna Lumley as Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous.

That Saunders has made a point of describing French this way is telling. First, it is a declaration of a personal connection, not simply a professional one. And it goes to the very heart of the chemistry of French and Saunders, and why they have been so successful. Even if that relationship includes potentially embarrassing wagers involving small fortunes.

Not all comedy duos are friends, and indeed, many have been enemies away from the stage or screen. "It's horrible when you think they're trying to be funny together but they don't actually like each other," says Saunders.

"People enjoy watching our friendship," she explains, "and the friendship is a huge part of our act. Because people know we're such good friends, we can actually be horrible to each other in the act, and actually insult each other in the act and it's funny."

Jennifer with Dawn French on tour.

In part, Bonkers: My Life in Laughs is an exploration of the friendship, and how the connection became the basis of their success, both as a duo and independently. It does not contain any behind-the-scenes angst, nor is it a story of personal misery.

Rather, it is an understated and often laugh-out-loud funny exploration of what has been, in the main, a happy 55 years of life. It also verges on the uplifting. Saunders is pleased to hear my review. "Oh good, that's exactly what I was aiming for," she says. "You know, I can't bear miserable books. You've got to have something that makes people laugh."

Of course, the title Bonkers is something of a giveaway. As Saunders says, it is always hard to find a title, and the publishers always have their suggestions. "Your life, it's just been bonkers," a friend told her. "Just call it Bonkers."

With husband Adrian Edmondson. Photo: Getty Images

The bonkers life of Jennifer Saunders had its beginnings as the daughter of an RAF officer who had a golden rule that the family could be serious, but could never take themselves seriously. He specialised in imitating visitors to their home he didn't like.

Only when she was writing the book did Saunders realise how much laughter there was at home. "There was not a pressure to be funny all the time but that actually, if you have a story to tell, then you told it in a funny way. And if it wasn't a funny story, you generally probably didn't tell it."

Yet Saunders was a serious-looking child, enduring the well-meaning advice of adults to "cheer up!" "The thing that's absolutely guaranteed to make you miserable is someone saying, 'cheer up!' There's nothing worse. You can't help it. I have a face that looks serious if I'm not smiling."

Bald after her chemotherapy treatment.

Despite being a generally happy, smiley person, Saunders was also quite shy and didn't like having her photo taken. "Most of the pictures of me in the early days are fairly grim," she says.

She also had a disconcerting habit of wandering off in restaurants and shops and staring at people. She hasn't completely shaken it. Her family - fellow comic Adrian Edmondson (Ade) and their three adult daughters - reprimand her: "Stop staring! Stop talking so loudly about them!"

But Ade is also accommodating. "If we go to a restaurant he knows immediately that I'm the one who has to be looking out," she says. "I need the view of the room. I love it, there's nothing better."

The life of an RAF family meant constant dislocation: her first six years were spent abroad and she went to seven schools, one twice. Saunders coped by developing a great internal life, where she could be happy in her own head. She loved to daydream and still does. "I think most people have their own little stories that they keep going," she says. "I used to have proper little episodes and if I didn't like the way I'd worked out one story I would think, 'Now, I'm gonna wait and when I've got time, I'll go back and I'll redo that'.''

The seven schools included Northwich Grammar School for Girls and the dreaded headmistress, Miss Janet Dines, who ruled by fear. Her tall, thin frame was always garbed in a black robe. At one assembly, a girl accused of swearing at Miss Dines was forced to wash her mouth out with soap.

"She was an absolutely ghastly woman," Saunders remembers. "Nowadays, she wouldn't be allowed to be anywhere near children. You'd be arrested, you know. You couldn't treat kids like that. She was appalling."

When she finished secondary school, Saunders didn't have a plan - a constant theme in her life, which in retrospect, explains much of her success. In this case, her mother filled out the forms for the Central School of Speech and Drama. Saunders thought she was going to study English, not be trained as a teacher.

Tuition, Saunders recalls, involved inventing lessons to keep the students busy while the staff went off to the pub.

But it was the place she first met Dawn French. The connection wasn't instant: French actually wanted to be a teacher and they were in different groups. Eventually, the friendship blossomed. Saunders writes, "I had found someone to play with, someone who was in on the joke."

The Menopause Sisters evolved into the Menopazzi Sisters, an old Italian circus act, with nipple tassels sewn on their backs. Each year, the school had an actors' cabaret. The actors didn't like mixing with the teachers. "They were fairly up themselves," Saunders says. So revenge was had in the decision by the Menopazzi Sisters to take the actors' stage time and perform.

They got their first real laughs, the first suggestion of what might come. The next step didn't come until French was teaching and Saunders was a self-described layabout. Saunders convinced French to audition for a new West End comedy venue, the Comedy Strip club.

Initially, they wanted to call themselves Kitsch 'n' Tiles, but Alexei Sayle, who was also performing, talked them out of it. The group of comics also included her future husband and Rik Mayall - who would join forces in The Young Ones. When the Comic Strip eventually closed, the comics formed their own touring troupe, which would lead them to the Adelaide Festival and some gigs in Melbourne in the early 1980s.

On their return to England, they made the movie Five Go Mad in Dorset for the new Channel 4, with the film broadcast on the channel's opening night. In the mid-1980s, French and Saunders were offered a series on BBC2.

To have one comedy pairing based on a true friendship is remarkable enough. Yet a second was taking shape.

In 1991, the fourth series of French and Saunders was ready to begin production. The plans were halted when Dawn French and then husband Lenny Henry heard they would be able to adopt a baby. What to do with the studio time that was booked? Their agent Maureen Vincent called and pushed Saunders.

"Come on," she told Saunders. "If Dawn's going to do that you've got to earn some money and use these studios. Why don't you write something?"

This was the genesis of the Absolutely Fabulous series, the success of which rests in no small part on the connection between Saunders' character Edina Monsoon and Patsy, played by Joanna Lumley.

Patsy was originally written as a hard-nosed journalist.

Ade suggested Lumley and when she read for the part, it became clear the character could be something else. "I could see that she was playing it very differently," says Saunders. "She wasn't going to be the hard-nosed thing.

''She brought to it all the Patsy stuff - the ex-model, the style - and once I realised how funny she was, I just wrote it for her. She just flew with it."

The show was an international success, including in the United States, where it was picked up by The Comedy Channel. Edina and Patsy were celebrated around the world and became gay icons. This led to them being honoured at the New York Senate during Gay Pride week. They decided to go in character - Saunders as Edina with a big white hat with an American flag tied around it.

This was a spectacular miscalculation.

The award event was a much more serious affair, filled with sombre-suited senators. The room heard moving stories of the struggles of brave people facing adversity.

"We were so cocky we'd got it completely right," says Saunders. "We thought, 'Well, we've nailed it. Clink of the champagne glasses. Boy we've nailed it. This is the way to go.'

"And it was such a come down. In future, please will someone tell us exactly what we're going to. It was a shocker.

"I absolutely wanted to curl up and die. Oh god, there's another person singing a song about a dead person from AIDS and all this stuff. Oh no, someone else is crying. Oh no, someone else is getting a round of applause for having a sex change.

"And there was just us, looking like a couple of lampshades."

The connection with Joanna Lumley is also based on a strong friendship. "In Joanna," writes Saunders, "I had found another double- act partner."

Saunders enjoys writing double acts and wouldn't contemplate doing stand-up. Even on the book-tour shows, she has someone else on stage to bounce off and prompt a story.

Joanna Lumley is also pushing her friend to finish the Ab Fab script. "She rings me up every two days to see if I've written any more," says Saunders. "If you don't write it now, we'll all be dead," Lumley tells her.

Saunders has sought some outside help for her procrastination, which may also help avoid the big payout to French. She has a friend Harriet who is the supportive friend. She is a rock of support, the friend, says Saunders, who consistently tells her to "F--k 'em, darling!"

But Harriet decided that if her friend was writing the Ab Fab script, she did not want Saunders calling her saying she hadn't done any work. She put Saunders in touch with an "absolutely brilliant" motivator/therapist.

He makes people look at why they are not working and the reasons behind it.

"And instead of putting negative thoughts in your head, you think more positively about what you are doing."

In Saunders' case, it was discovering she worked better in environments where she was surrounded by activity and people, such as a cafe. "It's actually so simple," she says.

Bonkers tells of a generally happy life - friendships, family and career. But it's also a real life, and Saunders deals with her experience of cancer. She was told she didn't have to include it.

"I actually remember it very well and it will up the word count, so let's put it in," she jokes. "And also I thought there are some really funny things that happen. But also it's worth putting it in to say it's not all a big laugh. And if it helps one person, I'll put it in."

A regular mammogram revealed a small lump. In the book, Saunders details her treatment, the times when humour wasn't the default position. "Physically, you get so drained and all your hormones disappear and you just want to cry," she says.

Her illness became public when a photograph of her was published - with her consent - without the wig she had been wearing because of the hair loss from chemotherapy. She and her agent issued a statement that explained the cancer had been caught early.

Another reason Saunders wanted to include the breast-cancer chapters was that she didn't want people to be so afraid of it. "Often there's this thing, 'Oh, it's cancer, it's chemotherapy.'

"Actually, if you just see it as a process, if you see it as the medicine and not the illness, that's the thing."

One of the strong themes to emerge is the support she got from her family, and indeed, the importance of family life. She writes about the role that work played for both her and her husband. "We keep the reason why we are working at the forefront of our minds. Making sure our kids are happy and having a nice life is always more important than anything, really."

Saunders says that people think "celebrities" just want fame and wealth.

She looks back to "growing up in a safe little gang of comedians. The priority was yes, to work and to have fun working and to be successful. But it was mainly about family and relationships and having friends and looking after the kids. That was always what you did it for, what you worked around."

And during her illness, the support of the family was very important. "It's times like that you think, 'this is good. This is what it's about, really'. It's what makes you able to do other stuff really and not be afraid. You feel safe in your world."

Jennifer Saunders will appear at the Wheeler Centre on April 23.

Bonkers: My Life in Laughs by Jennifer Saunders, published by Penguin, is out now.